Tag: Minneapolis

How Can Two Cities Develop the Area Between Them?

Posted on by robbie

With all the reports of a lack of funding of infrastructure and transit projects nationwide, the Twin Cities have some good news to share.
Last Saturday, they celebrated the opening of a third light-rail line: the Green Line.
The nearly $1 billion transportation project is touted as more than just an engineering project to connect the vein that pulses from St. Paul to Minneapolis — it’s the city’s biggest foray into economic revitalization yet.
The Green Line initiative is the result of more than three decades of planning — returning the vacant lots and blighted 11-mile stretch between the two cities back into the bustling corridor it once was during the early part of last century. Known as the Central Corridor, the Green Line’s route will provide public transit from the state Capitol through the area of immigrant-owned, small businesses and to the University of Minnesota’s campus.
But the project is more than just a means of transportation. Both city mayors contend the goal is to develop the stretch between St. Paul and Minneapolis, attracting new residents and businesses, underscoring that improved infrastructure can lead to growing neighborhoods, the National Journal reports.
A variety of developers and contractors have already spent $2.5 billion in construction and redevelopment on 121 projects over the last five years within a half-mile of the Green Line, according to local planning agency the Metropolitan Council.
But community members are also pitching in with planning. The Central Corridor Funders Collaborative (CCFC), comprised of 12 local and national foundations, has spent $10 million on strategy, planning, and funding initiatives throughout the corridor. In fact, the CCFC, the St. Paul city government, and the Metropolitan Council have doled out more than $3.5 million in loans to more than 200 small businesses in the area.The CCFC is also working with developers to create affordable-housing and assist students with housing and internships along the route.
The CCFC projects the Central Corridor will require 70,000 new housing units and $7 billion in development in the next 30 years with the addition of the Green Line, CCFC director Jonathan Sage-Martinson says.
The key to revitalization is transit-oriented development, or creating self-sustainability through commercial and residential development that hinges on good public transit,  according to the MinnPost.

“The experience across the country is that creating successful transit-oriented development takes not just transit, but the real commitment to create successful places,” said Adam Harrington, director of Service Development at the Metropolitan Council. “With the Green Line, we are really living that out.”

Along with new development, the Green Line has given many communities a boost in marketing and debuting each as cultural destinations. Part of Saturday’s grand opening included different celebrations at each stop, put on by each community.

“Transit is fundamentally about connecting — connecting one neighborhood to another, one city to another, a working mom to quality child care, a college student to classes, baseball fans to the stadium, and employers to their employees, ” said Metropolitan Council Chair Susan Haigh. “Implementing a comprehensive transit vision makes us stronger, healthier and more connected metro region.”

MORE: Minnesota Looks to a Historic Structure to Help End Veteran Homelessness

Can a Reverse Boot Camp Help Veterans Find Jobs?

Posted on by robbie

When veterans return from serving their country, it can be hard for them to figure out how to switch gears and transition into a new career.
Genesis10, a St. Paul-based technology and business consulting firm, is doing its part to help veterans go “from deployed to employed,” according to a motto on its website. Part of the process involves what they call a “reverse boot camp,” which helps former service members understand how a business mindset differs from the military one. One specific part of the training? Teaching soldiers “corporate speak,” which is different than how they talked in the military.
Katie Garske, a Genesis10 communications and social media manager told Elizabeth Millard of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal — which named the firm one of its Eureka! Award winners for innovative businesses in the Twin Cities — that lots of programs try to help vets find jobs, but “while well-intentioned, many of these efforts fail to make a significant impact on veteran unemployment, because each approach only partially addresses the issues that contribute to the overall problem.”
After finding there was a persistent demand for IT employees, Genesis10 hired Marine Corps veteran and reserve member Nick Swaggert in 2013 to run its veterans program. The company begins by evaluating prospective veteran employees to find out what their aptitudes and interests are. When it determines a vet would be a good fit for the IT or business sectors, Genesis10 welcomes him or her into its reverse boot camp, so they learn what the firm’s clients are looking for in an employee.
On Genesis10’s website, one veteran writes about his five-month frustrating search for a job that ended when he met a recruiter from Genesis10 looking for veterans with experience in GIS (aka Geographical Information Systems), a military specialization.
“Much of the messaging surrounding veteran unemployment has been ‘do it because it’s patriotic,'” Garske told Millard. “But veterans are not pity hires. Our clients are hiring them because it is a smart business decision.”
MORE: Does Military Jargon Prevent Vets from Landing Jobs?
 
 
 

Minneapolis’s Costly Jobs Program Pays Off

Posted on by robbie

Imagine being in your mid-40s and getting laid off from the job you’ve held for more than a decade. Talk about a moment of panic.
That’s the exact situation that Tracie Roberts faced in 2009 when she lost her job after 13 years of being a Target employee. With years of experience but without a college degree, Roberts — like many victims of the Great Recession — was stuck.
This story is all too familiar across the country, where unemployment continues to grip cities. But a local Minneapolis nonprofit has been proving for decades that taking the time to empower underserved members of the community (like Roberts) has its merits.
Twin Cities RISE! (TCR) is a job skills training program, founded in 1993, aimed at helping Minneapolis low-income residents. While it specifically targets men of color, applicants are both male and female and over the past few years, about a one-quarter of participants have been white, according to the Atlantic CityLab. Through a combination of training, mentoring, internship opportunities, and teaching courses focused on personal empowerment, the organization aims to help the unemployed find jobs that earn a living wage.
The program costs $5,000 annually per participant and can take more than seven months to complete. An applicant must have earned less than $20,000 in the past year and may not hold a four-year degree from a United States college. The requirements may sound rigid — but the program has proven successful.
Part of that success stems from TCR’s investment in each participant. The nonprofit teaches personal empowerment training — from improving self-esteem to developing relationship skills — and reinforces the concept throughout its entire program.

“It’s all about the thought process. It’s all about perception. How we think or feel,” said TCR instructor Quinten Osgood. “It’s about helping you look inside yourself for solutions.”

The concept has worked. Former CEO Art Berman and independent economists from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve and the state government estimate for every $1 invested in its program by the state, they reduce more than $7 to Minnesota taxpayers from increased state tax receipts, reduced state subsidies, and reduced recidivism among graduates.

Most of TCR’s funding is donated, but the organization also benefited from a state performance-based contract that earned them money every time a participant became employed and were still employed a year later.

Getting through the program is no small feat. About 400 students enroll each year, focusing on either office support, administrative-focused jobs, or operations like machine lifting. After taking courses on everything from resume writing and workplace communications to goal-setting and public speaking, students then apply for jobs. TCR tries to place participants in jobs that pay at least $20,000 a year with benefits, but that doesn’t always work out.

A student officially “graduates” after holding a job for more than a year. The nonprofit boasts that 81 percent of its graduates remain in their job in the first year and 70 percent remain in the second year. For the state of Minnesota, that’s a pretty effective jobs growth initiative.

Personal coaches also advise participants while they’re in the program and for the first two years after getting hired.  As CityLab points out, the transition from no job to one that pays $20,000 annually can be a lot of responsibility. TCR’s coaches and long-term empowerment method may take some time, but have proven to be a worthy investment.

Five years later, Roberts now works for the Hyatt Regency in downtown Minneapolis, taking summer classes at a community college for credit to eventually earn her bachelor’s degree in business management.

“I thought it would be a great free training program, I’d get my computer skills up. But it turned out to be so much more than that. It really did,” Roberts said.

MORE: Minnesota Looks to a Historic Structure to Help End Veteran Homelessness

 

Here’s How Thousands of Low-Income Americans Became Entrepreneurs

Posted on by robbie

For some struggling small business owners, success hinges on the ability to acquire a loan or capital to get off the ground.
For minorities, this can be even more a problem since they are more likely to be denied credit, according to the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy.
Fortunately for penny-pinching, aspiring entrepreneurs in Minneapolis, the nonprofit Neighborhood Development Center (NDC) offers training and tools they need to get their own businesses off the ground that ultimately, help revitalize their community.
Founded in 1993, the NDC offers entrepreneurship courses, small-business loans, and real-estate projects with a focus on turning vacant buildings into business incubators, according to the National Journal.
“There is just this huge untapped resource,” said Mihailo Temali, founder and chief executive officer of NDC.
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The NDC estimates that every new business it supports ultimately generates $100,000 annually for the local economy through rent, property taxes, and business expenses. The group also partners with community organizations, dispatching NDC-trained instructors to teach a 20-week course offered in five different languages. The course costs students between $100 and $600. The small business incubator has trained more than 4,400 people, 84 percent of which are non-white.
Alumni can apply for small business loans after completing the NDC class. The lending team examines the student’s finances and business plan and uses instructors for references. While not all students go on to continue their business plans, NDC’s default rate is a mere 5 percent — in part due to hardworking entrepreneurs but also positive support throughout the entire launch process.
For Haiyen Vang and her husband, Neeson, the NDC is the reason they can boast a chain of six discount clothing stores — The Clearance Rack — and a staff of 26 employees. Ten years ago, the couple received help at age of 22. Neeson worked at Wal-Mart while Haiyen managed a toddler with another baby on the way. With only their GEDs and bad credit, it was unlikely they could launch anything of their own.
But through NDC training, a loan, and a network for support and advice, a decade later the Vangs are planning to nationally franchise their once-small business. The Clearance Rack is one of around 500 NDC-assisted businesses in the Twin Cities area.

“NDC assisted us, but then at the same time, we helped ourselves,” Haiyen said, noting the NDC’s ripple effect of giving back to the community. “It’s just amazing how the cycle just repeats. And it gets bigger and better every time.”

How ‘The Golden Girls’ Can Help Solve a Problem Facing Senior Women

Posted on by robbie

“The Golden Girls” went off the air in 1992, but many of us still remember the show about four senior women sharing a home in Miami, in part because there hasn’t been anything else like it on T.V.
It turns out “The Golden Girls” was ahead of its time in more ways than one, and that its model of communal living—with some good-natured bickering thrown in—might provide a solution to a problem facing millions of Baby Boomer women as they reach retirement age. One third of Baby Boomer women live alone, and 50.8 percent of the 78.2 million Boomers in America are women. Many of these single women are divorced, a situation that often leaves their finances in disarray as they head into retirement.
According to the PBS NewsHour, the median income of senior women in Minneapolis was $11,000 less than that for men, which gave Connie Skillingstad an idea. She runs Golden Girl Homes, Inc., which helps match older women in the Twin Cities with others who’d like to reduce loneliness and split expenses by sharing a home. She told Spencer Michels of the NewsHour that each of the women who band together as roommates offers some asset that can help the others. “For example, there are women who have no money, but they have a house. They have space and they can share it with somebody, and it will help them to survive,” she said.
Karen Bush, Louise Machinist, and Jean McQuillan are longtime friends in their 60s, each of them divorced, who now share houses in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Sarasota, Florida. The women reach agreements about cooking, cleaning, finances, and what to do should any of them fall ill. They have legal documents in place stipulating what would happen if any of them are no longer able to take care of themselves. Together, they’re renovating their Florida condo to allow them to age in place. Bush told Michels, “The whole setup that we have here is going to help me be independent for a long time. And at the point at which I can no longer be independent, I will have additional resources to pay for what I need.”
Half a million women over the age of 50 in America live with roommates who are not romantic partners. Now this sounds like a case of smart women banding together to solve their own problems. Could a sitcom be next?
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A New Study Yields Surprising Results About Low-Income People and Food Deserts

Posted on by robbie

Whether it’s a traveling bus full of vegetables or convenience stores stocked with farmer’s market produce, people across this country are coming up with innovative ways to solve the problems caused by food deserts. And these creative programs are having a big impact in some neighborhoods.
More low-income people tend to live in food deserts and have a hard time accessing transportation to grocery stores and farmers markets — exacerbating the problems of obesity-related illness among the poor. Or so the theory goes.
Jerry Shannon wondered if this was true, so during his doctoral program in geography at the University of Minnesota, he studied where 275,366 recipients of SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, once known as food stamps) in the Twin Cities purchased their groceries from 2009 to 2010.
Shannon discovered that SNAP recipients often travel to supermarkets outside their communities. “You can’t just assume people shop where they live,” Shannon told Cynthia Boyd of the MinnPost. These people shop outside their neighborhoods in part “because of perceived better quality and lower prices of suburban stores,” Shannon said.
Shannon’s findings are detailed in “Rethinking Food Deserts: An Initial Report of Findings,” published in Social Science & Medicine. On his website, he offers an interactive map showing where those who receive SNAP benefits live, where they redeem their benefits, and the types of stores they shop at. Shannon isn’t suggesting that communities stop working on the problem of food deserts, but he told Boyd, “We need more sophisticated ways about seeing how people access the food system.” He just might be the researcher to advance these studies.
MORE: This Innovative Idea Brings Produce Directly to Low-Income Communities

Here’s a Simple Way to Get Your Community Interested in Better Bike Lanes

Posted on by robbie

Biking around town would be a lot more enjoyable if it weren’t for the constant fear of cars speeding by. In Minneapolis, a community coalition called Bikeways for Everyone is hoping to get more cyclists on the street by building 30 miles of protected bike lanes — dedicated zones that put a physical barrier between car traffic and riders — by 2020. These bikeways, also known as “cycle tracks,” not only provide bikers with safer places to ride, but also create more pedestrian-friendly streetscapes and opportunities for appealing greenspace. In commercial areas, these types of lanes also promote local businesses by increasing foot traffic. According to a study from the New York Department of Transportation, businesses along 9th Avenue in New York City, where the country’s first protected bike lane was constructed, saw an increase of 49 percent in retail sales. But then again, this should come as no surprise given research that bike riders spend more at local businesses, simply because it’s easier for them to hop off a bike than it is to park a car.
MORE: What Has Two Wheels, Two Pedals and Can Boost the Economy?
While Minneapolis has incorporated elements of protected bike lanes into some areas, the city has yet to construct one that is a fully functioning. Plans to build a protected bikeway downtown on Washington Avenue are waiting to be approved (construction would start in 2015), so in the meantime, Bikeways for Everyone decided to test the waters and get the public on board. Last summer, volunteers gathered together to construct 15 plywood planters and set them up at each of the city’s four Open Streets events, creating a “pop-up” protected bike lane. Volunteers flagged bikers to ride through the protected area, and at the end, asked them to sign a petition to create permanent lanes like these across the city. “You don’t need a whole lot of space to get the point across that you have a space to ride your bike that’s protected from cars and pedestrians,” Andrew Kuncel, one of the event organizers, told People for Bikes.
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The demonstration cost about $600, but can be done for a lot less using cheaper materials, and can be implemented in any city (with local approval, of course). The idea is to show citizens how nice — and safe — bike riding can be, even in areas that are predominantly car-friendly, and encourage them to advocate for protected bike lanes in their cities. “My vision is that this campaign is successful, we have 30 miles of protected bikeway, and I can bring my kid everywhere we need to go … on a bike,” says Minneapolis Bicycle Coalition President Molly Sullivan. “And that bicycle ridership increases throughout the city so much so that the city says, ‘This is not a ‘nice to have.’ This is a ‘need to have.'”
MORE: 9 Surprising Infrastructure Innovations Happening Right Here in America

Here’s Why We Should Be Investing in Single Moms

Posted on by robbie

What happens if you give a single mom high-quality childcare, higher education and a place to live? A whole lot, actually.
The Jeremiah Program in Minneapolis has helped more than a thousand low-income single mothers and their children build better lives and break the cycle of poverty since it began in 1998. The program provides the mothers with affordable housing at its campus and free preschool for the children so their moms can pursue their education at nearby Minneapolis Community & Technical College. Ninety-five percent of the kids leave the preschool ready for kindergarten, and ninety-percent of the mothers are able to maintain steady employment after they finish the Jeremiah Program. This program works so well because it addresses the problems faced by two generations at once—low-income moms often struggle to complete their educations or hold a job while dealing with the demands of caring for young children, while their kids often receive sub-standard childcare or don’t attend preschool at all, setting back their educations before they even begin.
It costs about $25,000 to see one mom and her children through the program, but an independent analysis found a $4 return to the community for every dollar invested in these families, and a $16 million lifetime benefit for every 100 families elevated from poverty. The Jeremiah Program has expanded to Austin, Texas, Fargo, N.D., and St. Paul, Minn., while cities including Boston, Rochester, Minn. and Dayton, Ohio are working to replicate the program. Amira Masri, who participates in the Jeremiah Program with her daughter Arcadia, told Mary Stegmeir of the Des Moines Register, “My mom was a single mom, and her mom was a single mom. I feel like I’m the (one) that’s going to change our pattern … and end the cycle of poverty here, now with Arcadia.”